Reports on Courses

Setlhare runs courses on content and teaching skills, either as stand-alone courses or as part of school-based support. The courses are mostly based on CAPS content and sequence. The content and focus can be adjusted depending on the needs of schools in a particular year.

Typically, courses are for two to four days, or a series of afternoons. They can be run during term time or holidays, depending on what schools need. We need enough people attending to make a course worthwhile.

You can see some sample course outlines and reports below.

In Term 1, for teaching in Term 2

For Grade 4-7 science and technology: Structures, processing of materials and the nature of matter (4 days). See a course description here, and a report on the 2013 course here (When you see blue text with an underline, click on it.)

For Technology Grade 4-9: Mechanical and electrical systems (2 days) I’ve lost the report but will put it up as soon as I find it.

She can build this circuit – she’s in Grade 6. Our courses enable teachers to enable children to do things like this.These teachers are setting up their solar cookers and solar water heaters, to test their designs.

In Term 3, for teaching in Term 4

For primary school science and technology teachers: The Planet Earth and Beyond. This course deals mainly with astronomy (2 days) You can see a course outline here and a report here.

Making a shadow clock that tells the time accurately is an activity that raises a lot of fruitful questions.Children enjoy making and setting their sundials — it’s a simple activity but it’s great for creating awareness of the apparent motion of the Sun across the sky.

For Senior Phase science and technology teachers: The Planet Earth and Beyond. As for primary schools, this course deals mainly with astronomy (2 days)

At the end of September we had a two-day course on The Planet Earth & Beyond. This generated some more examples of learning activities that children enjoy and, I think, insight into how people become aware of movements of objects in the sky. There’s a REPORT you can download here, with pictures..

This is a blog on practical work in science and technology. Children can’t learn science and technology simply from books; they have to experience what the physical world really does. Continue reading →